Beauty and the Bleat
by Your Diva, Robin Pastorio-Newman

The embattled 2002 Miss World contest faded from the headlines when organizers took their ballgowns and went home to London. Does anyone know who won? Ever curious, Your Darling, Your Diva, Your One True Love turned to www.google.com for a summary of events. Instead, Your Duct Tape Bra found that anyone who ever bought flowers runs, consults for or competes in pageants, and these self-esteem factories might really be our alien masters' plan for global domination through baton twirling and aerobic exercise.
 
The circumstances leading to creation of a pageant range from simple tourism in Atlantic City to obscure revenge on ... someone. Pageants themselves range from absurdly wholesome to patently scamtastic, struggling to rejoin popular culture late in the twentieth century or even just find themselves without GPS. Whatever the contest, pageant sponsors are intent on selling audiences something, be it old-new-borrowed-blue-and-still-tasty or an aneurysm. Researchers can find the easily-apprehended side by side with the silly and incomprehensible. Yes, that screen is purple. You haven't accidentally bought the brain bust.
 
As remote as a pageant seems from everyday life in industrialized states, we have them in every county and some places where that'd confound cartographers. You'd think people would be talking, and they are. They sure are. In fact, even our stoic bastions of reason can't help themselves. Nosirree, Bob! Plainly, you have pageant-related needs. Fortunately, intrepid entrepreneurs chassez forward to meet them. Thank goodness, because with so, so many pageants you couldn't avoid them all without a Sherpa guide, and we haven't even discussed the men's versions.
 
But what of Your Vaseline-Coated Bicuspids' original search for information about the transplanted Miss World competition? The news services were strangely mum on the topic. After the terrible violence abated, death threats were issued and someone, somewhere was crowned, only staid China had anything to say. That's right. China wants to host Miss World.
 

©2002 Robin Pastorio-Newman